Silvermont is Intel’s first CPU core tailored for power efficient applications such as smartphones, tablets, and microservers. The 22nm microarchitecture features updated instruction set extensions, full out-of-order execution with a tightly coupled L2 cache, aggressive power management, and a new high performance SoC fabric. These enhancements deliver tremendous performance and frequency gains over the aging Atom core, putting Intel’s mobile strategy in a more competitive position.

The iPad 3 was an influential and successful tablet, but an excellent example of an unbalanced system. In particular, the superb Retina display was not adequately matched by the GPU of the A5X, and represented a step backwards in terms of graphics capabilities. This article explores the challenges of designing innovative products given the underlying technical constraints, through the lens of the iPad 3 and its successors.

Near-threshold voltage computing extends the voltage scaling associated with Moore’s Law and dramatically improves power and energy efficiency. The technology is superb for throughput, at the cost of latency, and best suited to Intel’s products for HPC and mobile graphics.

The new ARMv8 architecture is classically British; a clean and elegant 64-bit instruction set, with compatibility for 32-bit software. The 64-bit mode eliminates many complicated and awkward features and will foster a larger and more diverse ARM ecosystem with new licensees and applications.

For 4 years, Intel has struggled to move into the market for mobile devices. Conventional wisdom holds that x86 is too inefficient for smart phones. The recently announced 32nm Medfield proves that x86 is a viable option and that Intel can design smart phone products. We explore the Medfield SoC and analyze the impact on Intel’s mobile strategy.

With all the recent changes, AMD seems like a ship adrift at sea with no clear strategy or vision. We look at AMD and where they are likely to head in the coming years for tablets and phones and explain why they will stick with x86, rather than embrace ARM as some have suggested.

Nvidia’s Kal-El sports a novel 5th ‘companion’ core to lower idle power. We look at the trade-offs and benefits to this approach and explain why it will be a strong tablet SoC, but only an incremental gain for smartphones.

Hot Chips 21 is nearly upon us, and with it comes updates from the major processor vendors and players in the PC industry and beyond. Key themes this year include CPUs, chipsets, FPGA and GPU co-processors and academic parallelism research. Our preview will briefly discuss and analyze some of the more interesting topics, with CPU highlights including AMD’s Magny Cours, Fujitsu’s SPARC64-VIIIfx, IBM’s POWER7, Intel’s trifecta of Moorestown, Beckton/Nehalem-EX and Westmere, and Rainbow Falls from Sun. In the broader ecosystem, there will be presentations on OpenCL, Ion from Nvidia, TI’s OMAP SOC for mobile phones, and three major parallelism labs – Berkeley, Illinois and Stanford.